Sometimes, a final resting place is far from final.
When the Howeth family interred their loved ones in Poplar Island’s soil in the late 1800s, they probably had no idea that the ground, along with everything on it and in it, would disappear in a matter of decades.
A mixture of forces — sinking land, rising seas and erosion — chewed away at the Chesapeake Bay island just off Maryland’s Eastern Shore. By the 1920s, the last of the original 100 residents had been forced to flee. By the early 1990s, nothing of Poplar remained above water but a few small scrapes of marshland.
Water has claimed countless cemeteries and individual graves around the Chesapeake. As climate change accelerates the pace of sea level rise, much more hallowed ground is at risk of vanishing.
But the descendants of those buried at Poplar fought for a different outcome. More than 60 years ago, an aging family member led a mission that rescued the remaining five headstones from a watery grave. Then, fate intervened. A history-making project to rebuild Poplar Island gave them the opportunity to bring those stones back to where they had once stood.
At the center of this story are an aging father, Louis Howeth, and his son, Lee. (The family surname morphed its spelling after they left Poplar.) Lee, an IT specialist at the Shore’s Salisbury University, has raced against time over the past few years to fulfill his father’s dream while he was still alive to see it.
The Bay Journal reported this story over 15 months. What follows is the account of an unlikely reunion told by those who made it happen.
Broken ties
Louis Howeth: People would say well, “If you could be anywhere in the world, where would you be?” This person would say, “Well, in New York.” My father said, “Poplar Island.”
Lee Howeth: There’s definitely some story to be told about the island fading away and the restoration that they’re doing. This is kind of the human side of that story.
Louis: [My family] had a farming operation. I understand that the Howarth family owned over 1,000 acres [on Poplar]. They were timber people. They were farmers.
Kristina Motley (senior environmental specialist, Maryland Environmental Service): People used to live out here. The first date we like to focus on is the year 1847. And the reason is that’s when they first measured the area of the land. At that time, they found it to be 1,140 acres in size, a fairly large island. It housed a town called Valiant, where there were about 100 individuals.
Louis: My mother told stories on how there were 16 old, brick-solid — not brick veneer — but solid homes over there.
Motley: There was a schoolhouse [that also served as a church] with a cemetery attached to that, a general store, a post office and a sawmill.
Louis: My mother told a story about how she and dad were lying in bed one night. All of a sudden, they heard this terrible squeal. The men get up the next morning to go out to the farm, went down to the water, and there was a cow down there without its tail. Mother said that it was Chessie, the monster that lived on the Bay [that had attacked the cow].
Motley: By the 1920s, all the full-time residents had to move off the island due to erosion. The water was pretty much coming up to their doorstep.
Louis: My father said, “We watched a field go, and we didn’t really think too much about it because when it gets to that woods, the trees will stop it.” Well, they weren’t thinking about the fact that the tide and waves would undermine the roots. Suddenly, you just have a tree on roots, and nothing in the ground. That was my first understanding of erosion firsthand.
Lee: People that lived out there spent their whole lives, raised families and died on the island.
Louis: [My father] had a lot of — I wouldn’t call them regrets — but he had a lot of thoughts about how he could have maintained the island itself. They had to sell [their portion of] the island, must have been early 1900s. It was a money thing.
Motley: The island went through a variety of different owners after that.
Saving the stones
Louis: There was a cemetery plot [remaining on Poplar]. My uncle, Harvey Howarth, used to go over there with his lawn mower to keep it looking nice. He said to me one day [in the 1960s], “We got to get over to that island. That graveyard is eroding, and I think we’ve lost some of the stones already.”
Lee: [Harvey] was in his probably late 70s. He didn’t have the means or capability to do it by himself. So, he asked a friend of his, Willie Rowe, to help. He, Willie and another friend went out [to Poplar] and looked for the stones.
Willie Rowe: (speaking to the Baltimore Sun in 2006): He’d been asking me two months before that to take him. That one day was a Saturday. I said, “I’ll take you right now.”
Louis: They had a row skiff and went to the island.
Lee: They didn’t take any tools. They didn’t realize they were going to be taking them [when they set off]. They had to get down on their hands and knees and literally dig with their hands to get the gravestones out.
Louis: They couldn’t find any evidence of the bodies themselves. All they had was stones.
Lee: From oldest to youngest, there’s Levi Howarth. He was my great-great grandfather. Then, there’s his son, George. He was my great-grandfather. And George’s first wife, Mary, is there. There’s a stone for their son, Grover. And there’s a stone for George’s son, Melvin, whom he had with his second wife, Lizzie.
Louis: The water was intruding into the cemetery. It was turning into a marsh. It was muddy.
Lee: They ended up taking [all five remaining stones] and bringing them back to Tilghman Island and placing them on Willie Rowe’s property. They were there for 50-plus years. My great-uncle would go there and mow the grass and keep them up and plant flowers.
Poplar Island is reborn
Motley: When the U.S. Army Corps came out in 1993, they did another land survey on the island. They found that the island had shrunk from that 1,140 acres to less than 5 acres. And those 5 acres weren’t even one continuous island. They were split between four tiny “remnant islands.”
We are restoring the island by using fresh material from the Baltimore [shipping] channels that we bring here to Poplar Island to restore habitat for our native species. We started construction in 1998 and received our first bit of inflow of dredged material in 2000. We’ve been slowly filling it up ever since.
Poplar Island gravestones arrive
The Howarth family gravestones arrive at Poplar Island on May 8, 2024, to be reinstalled on the restored island.
It’s been estimated that in our known history about 400 islands have been lost in the Bay. Every year, we lose about 260 acres of this wetland habitat. It’s very important habitat that is very much on the decline.
[Poplar] is sort of a sanctuary. We get a lot of migratory birds. We’ve been able to identify over 400 different species of animals that have come back to the island. Over 250 of them are bird species.
Hatching a plan
Lee (speaking in March 2023): We want to get [the headstones] in a permanent place. Over the years, I’ve kind of felt that sense of burden. My father’s 85. I’d kind of like to see him see it through and see them put back where they belong.
About three or four months back, Willie Rowe passed away. And my father, realizing that the house was going to be sold, felt the need to move [the headstones] quickly. So, right now they’re at my cousin’s house [also on Tilghman].
Louis (speaking in November 2023 at Lee’s home, where he had recently moved because he could no longer live on his own): I said to my son, Lee, “Before something happens to me, those tombstones down on Willie Rowe’s farm, in my opinion, should go back to the island.”
Lee (responding to his father): You talked to me about it probably for the last 20 years.
Louis: There was talk about putting them other places, but I thought, “That’s where they came from.”
Preparing for gravestone installation, Poplar Island
Lee emailed the Maryland Environmental Service, which is involved with the restoration work. Ryland Taylor, then an environmental specialist at the agency, quickly responded.
Ryland Taylor: It was too good of an opportunity to pass up to bring them back here.
Lee (in November 2023): Everything’s hung up, waiting on a legal document to be drafted that dad will sign with one of my cousins. It essentially says we don’t have any claim to the tombstones anymore. I don’t feel like we ever really did have a claim to them. I feel like in every way they belong to the island more than they ever belonged to us.
Another hangup: The stones needed refurbishment. Some were missing the entire underground portion. The family took the stones to Tony LeCompte (pronounced “lay count”) of LeCompte Monument in Laurel, DE, to have them fixed.
Tony LeCompte (speaking in May 2023): We are fabricating new parts to replace the missing parts. They’re from other old stones that were destroyed. They were hit by a car. So, it’s kind of from the same vintage time with the replacement parts.
The final step will be epoxy and then cleaning the stones to make them look as if they’ve been cleaned, but not new. I don’t want them to look like they came right out of the factory or the quarry. ... My family does go back a long, long way here. I’m sure I have relatives whose stones have been broken and washed out into the Bay. I want to be part of the process of fixing them and putting them back where they belong.
The headstones return
By May 2024, the headstones’ restoration was complete, and the legal hurdles cleared. The job of ferrying the headstones to Poplar fell to Robert Wilson, a 72-year-old waterman based on Tilghman Island who has a contract with the Maryland Environmental Service to haul freight to the island. For the final resting place, officials selected a shady spot adjacent to a courtyard of stone pavers.
Katie Perkins (Poplar project manager for the Army Corps): As soon as visitors arrive here and step off the boat, they will see it.
Motley: This is where we gather every tour. We’ll talk about the history of the island. We’ll definitely have [the headstones] here, front and center, for people to come and visit. And we’ll definitely talk about their story to give a full picture of what Poplar Island really is.
A family celebration
On June 4, a little more than a dozen Howeth family members climbed aboard a boat on Tilghman for the 20-minute ride to Poplar. The stones, gleaming white, were standing upright once again in two neat rows. Workers had spread a layer of pea gravel around them, shaped like a heart.
Lee: I’m amazed. I’m impressed that we’ve got everybody here to see it together. These [names on the headstones] are all Howarths here. But they represent a bigger community that is here and many other surnames and other people that were here.
Bobbie Sue Knight (Louis’ great-niece): I don’t think I ever came out here. Not to say I didn’t hear all the stories.
Howeth family, Poplar Island
Howeth family members gathered on Poplar Island on the day their ancestors' gravestones were rededicated. (Courtesy of the Howath family)
Lorie Fluharty (also a great-niece): They look like they were made to be here. It makes a connection with the past even though I didn’t know these people. It makes it more real.
Lee: Today’s just the end of a 60-year journey for these stones. It’s an emotional day, and I’m happy to see it completed. They’re back where they belong. (Turning to his father standing beside him, gripping a silver cane) What do you think?
Louis: Absolutely.
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